Got Hope

by Michael Darling

  I held up the flashlight where she could see it. Let her draw her own conclusions. “Found it.”

  “Oh. Okay,” she replied.

  “You ready for breakfast?”

  The thought of eating Max’s food made Hope bounce and clap. “Yes!”

  She bounced back into the house. I followed, trying not to limp.

  I preferred the “golden rule” over the “eye for an eye” rule. Although when you boiled it all down, they were pretty much the same thing. An “eye for an eye” was more proactive than the “do unto others as you would have done unto you” but ultimately you hoped to be rewarded for your good behavior while the other guy got punished. What person turning the other cheek didn’t hope for a little karmic payback? Preferably, payback while you’re watching with popcorn and a cold beverage.

  But burning Hope just because she’d laughed at me? Why? I would have laughed at me too. It was a human reaction. I’d felt the same burning anger when Wince hadn’t listened to me when I wanted to leave the castle. And, to a lesser degree, when the lady at the store had laughed at me because I had makeup stains.

  There are frustrations every day. Things go wrong. It’s part of life. But I never got filled with rage like that.

  “Bacon!” Hope’s voice traveled all the way from the kitchen. And behold, we had bacon.

  “Look, Max made bowls!” Hope had a bacon bowl on a plate, heaped with a mixture of eggs and cheese and vegetables. She sampled the filling and broke off a piece of the bowl to nibble. She nodded her head repeatedly while she chewed as if the food were a favorite dance tune. I found it sweet that the simplest things made her happy.

  Yet just a minute ago, I’d been ready to make her burn.

  Chapter Twelve: Penny Andy

  It took a couple of hours for us to find the numbers for the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles, her bank, and the ten different credit cards Hope had carried in her lost purse. She’d had two Visa cards, two MasterCards, a Discover, and an American Express in addition to Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom’s, and a Chevron gas card.

  Once she was settled in by the phone, one-eight-hundreding her way through her disasters, I hopped in the car and headed out.

  Although Marcus had a plan to ruin Hope with fake photos and that impossible video, the possibility that he’d also been responsible for the bomb nagged at me. The stolen plastic bag with the bits of briefcase and handcuffs weighed heavily on me as well, especially since I knew the bug brothers were connected to Marcus. Then there was the vanishing gun from last night. It felt like the bad guys were three steps ahead of me and they knew what avenues I’d need to find them, so they walled those avenues off. To solve this mess, I’d need to do some old-fashioned gumshoeing. Therefore, I had a date with a parking lot and later, some dogs.

  My first stop was the stadium lot where Hope had been shot. The bullet was not in the car and the gun had evaporated, but one other possibility remained. The casing. The perpetrator had taken only one shot, and the casing would have been ejected from the gun. It should be near where the shooter had been, unless it had been picked up by someone taking a walk or cleaning the lot. And the bullet might have bounced off Hope’s shield and landed on the ground as well.

  After that, I wanted to talk to a private detective with copper-colored hair named Andy Penrod. Between the hair and his manifest willingness to take cheap shots for cheap money, he’d acquired the not-undeserved nickname Penny Andy. He notoriously spent Fridays at the Flagler Greyhound Track right here in Miami, which ran live dogs from June through November. I’d met Penny Andy once, so I knew what he looked like. Due to circumstances mostly beyond my control, I didn’t want him to see me coming.

  The stadium lot was all but deserted. There were two cars, far apart. Probably left by drivers who had celebrated too hard after the victory and taken a taxi home to avoid a DUI. I passed close to the cars as I went in just to see if someone was sleeping in either of them. Maybe wearing black. Both were empty.

  Stopping a hundred yards from where we’d parked last night, I felt pessimistic about my chances of finding the bullet or the casing. The whole situation had such an odd vibe. The timing was weird because we had just spoken to Marcus, disabled his Henchtweedles, and the shooter had attacked after. The location was odd because the shooter had been lying in wait for us to get back to the car. It was also odd because the shooter had only shot one bullet. It would be different maybe if it had been a sniper but it had been a handgun instead.

  I didn’t have high hopes but I had to try.

  I scanned the ground in front of me. There had been no wind. Maybe a light breeze. Still, it was possible the casing had been blown around and rolled a little way. Because the closed end of the casing had a rim, the casing was larger on that end than on the open end. That meant it would have rolled on a curve and the diameter of that curve would be small. In a heavier wind, it could have rolled and slid and tumbled, but I started with the premise that there hadn’t been a wind strong enough to push it far. As for the bullet, it could have deformed into any shape colliding with Hope’s shield. Maybe it rolled. Probably not.

  In my mind, I pictured a grid on the ground and started walking the column between the car and the spot where the shooter had likely been standing. The bullet could be anywhere nearby but the casing would have been ejected from the chamber to the right of the gun, so the casing would have traveled to my left when I was facing this direction. The casing should therefore be in the quadrant in front of me and to my left, based on the grid I pictured.

  I followed my grid search for fifteen minutes, moving over to a new imaginary column each time I came to the edge of the lot or got back to a spot parallel to where I’d started. Then I tried the quadrant on the other side of my original search path since that was the most likely direction for the casing to be pushed by a breeze.

  With my enhanced vision, I saw everything in pristine detail and no object escaped me. My heartbeat jumped as I caught occasional glimmers of metal but I just ended up with twenty-seven cents in change, a broken pen, a tube of lip balm with the balm melted out of it, and a stick of gum with black tire marks but still in its silver wrapper. Juicy Fruit.

  No casing. No bullet.

  Curry-covered cuss words.

  If the shooter had come back to pick up the evidence, he was a very careful criminal.

  I turned in a circle, willing my visual radar to pick up the one blip I needed. Nothing.

  Fine. Dead end. Can’t do anything about it. Time to go.

  My mood continued to curdle driving to the dog track. Now I hoped Penny Andy would see me coming so I could catch the look on his face.

  The Flagler Greyhound track, located in the Magic City Casino facility, testified of humanity’s primal need to watch supermodel purebreds chase mechanical meat puppets for money. I liked the dogs a lot. They were gentle and sweet and beautiful. Each one born to race with more elegance and power than a Lamborghini. And each one with a face every mother could love.

  Post time was 11:45 a.m., so I had about half an hour to find Penny Andy.

  It wasn’t hard. Andy considered himself a gambling genius, which was why he always had to take stalk-and-shot jobs to replenish his income. He also jealously guarded his methods and always sat by himself so nobody would steal his “secrets.” I had acquired all this intel when he’d been unable to shut up about himself the first and last time we’d met.

  After walking across the bottom of the stands and not seeing him, I tried inside. I found him at a small table in the casino next to the “railbird” window looking out on the track. Elapsed time from my car to his table: four minutes. As advertised, he sat alone, looking like the love child of Jabba the Hutt and Danny DeVito from Romancing the Stone, only less charming. His head sported a short-cropped crop of copper, and I wondered what would happen if I dropped one of the pennies I’d found on his hair. It would probably disappear. Or ignite.

  His wardrobe consisted of a cream-colored
linen suit with a pink t-shirt from the retro Crockett-and-Tubbs collection at K-Mart along with scuffed-up boat shoes with no socks. I suddenly had the theme song from Miami Vice in my head so the morning was looking up.

  Penny Andy was making notes on this morning’s entry forms, which was a list of the dogs scheduled to run the first round of races. He also had a stat sheet and about a dozen small objects on the table in front of him, including wind-up chattering teeth, one of those birds that dips its beak in water, and what looked like a donut with cream cheese filling but was plastic. If his goal was to keep people away by looking like a nut case, it was working. The tables on either side of him were empty.

  “What’s up, Andy?” I came to a stop like I thought he’d be happy to see me.

  “You owe me a thousand bucks, Luck.” Andy didn’t even look up from his racing form.

  “I’m sorry we had to bust your perp before you could scrape enough scum off the pond to get paid,” I replied. “The way we were chatting after, I thought you were okay with it.”

  “That wasn’t the worst part, Luck. The worst part is you got my client arrested too. And the more I think about it, the more steamed I get.”

  “Maybe your client shouldn’t have stolen that car before her boyfriend decided to rob the convenience store. Like I said, sorry.”

  “Yeah. There’s moss growing in your ears because your pillow gets all soggy from the tears you cry at night.”

  I had to process that for a second, but to Andy’s credit, I saw what he did there.

  Andy put his pencil down with effort and looked up at me, face blank. “Is there a reason you’re interrupting me so close to post time?”

  “Did your car-thieving client really promise you a thousand dollars?”

  Penny Andy gave me a stare that was supposed to carry some weight, I guess. It was at least a pennyweight stare. “Get gone, Got,” he sighed. “I’m busy.”

  “Look. I have questions,” I replied. “And you’re the guy most likely to have answers.”

  “Not interested.” Andy picked up the pencil again and went back to his notes.

  “Know anybody who can falsify a surveillance video?” I asked.

  “Well it just so happens I mighta heard about somebody who could do that.” He put a shot glass with water in front of the dipping bird and tilted it so it’s beak could get wet. “Too bad I’m not going to tell you.”

  “There’s several million dollars at stake,” I said.

  “Yeah? Gimme one and I’ll see what I can do.”

  “And the safety and security of a girl and her disabled father.”

  “The heart bleeds.”

  I pretended he was going to cooperate and took a seat. I scooted closer to the table but not close enough for us to be touching.

  He responded by looking at me sideways and blowing a sigh out of his nostrils like a bull. There may have been flaring. Then he did his best impression of him ignoring me and went back to work. In addition to the other toys, he had a slinky, some silly putty, a set of jacks with a bouncy ball, and a rag doll in a gingham dress with her hair up in pigtails. Penny Andy had put a star by three different dogs on the racing form.

  With my enhanced vision, I could read everything without looking like I was peeking.

  Names for racing dogs fell into a few well-worn categories: pop-culture puns, references to speediness, and rip-offs of celebrity names. The slate for the first race had The Dog’s Meow, Now U C Me, Look at the Thyme, Muffin Topnotch, Pug’s Favorite, Opal Lightning, Allegheny Alf, and Amber Heard You. Andy had marked The Dog’s Meow, Muffin Topnotch, and Opal Lightning.

  Andy decided maybe I was looking. “You aren’t copyin’ me, are you?”

  “Do you ever see me down here, Andy? I’m not a gambler. I’m here because you’re a sure bet to help me with a problem.” I smiled.

  “Well the odds on that happening are getting longer by the minute, Luck.”

  “Probably.”

  Sighing was his favorite form of communication, I decided, as he sighed again. He took the silly putty next and spread it out on the form. Traditional printing would have allowed the putty to copy the whole section but the racing form was probably done on a laserjet and it only copied the pencil marks Andy had made himself. He laid it out on the table. As soon as the bird bobbed up out of its glass of water, Andy moved the glass aside and looked up at the ceiling and slid the silly putty forward so that it rested in front of the bird. He looked down and waited for the bird to move again. He watched intently as the bird bobbed down and when it did, he made some notes on the form.

  With the silly putty in the middle of the table, Andy wound up the chattering teeth and let them hop around the table while he shifted the slinky back and forth between his hands. When the teeth stopped, he looked at their position relative to the silly putty and how much of the slinky was sitting in one hand compared to the other.

  More notes ensued.

  Finally, he held the doll in one hand while he tossed the bouncy ball in the air, swept up some jacks, then caught the ball. He got six of the eight jacks. He was—no insult to the macadamians of the world—nuts.

  Andy made more notes and sighed again. He used his phone to place his bet.

  “That’s it? That’s all?” I said. “I thought it would be more complicated than that.”

  “Shut up, Luck.”

  “You do this before every race?”

  Andy ignored me.

  “Have you considered the possibility that you’re using superstitious rituals to avoid responsibility for your decisions?”

  Andy gave me another round of ignoring. I reached for the chattering teeth.

  “Don’t touch.”

  Got him talking.

  “Why the kid’s toys?” I asked.

  Andy rolled his eyes to the ceiling, like the answer should be obvious. “Children are very intuitive. But have you ever tried to bring a five-year-old into a casino?”

  “Okay. And all these rituals work for you?”

  Andy smirked. “These ‘rituals’ aren’t all important. Some of them I use to throw people off. They all look important. That’s the genius part because anybody trying to figure out what I do will think they’re all pieces of my system but they aren’t. It’s called misdirection.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Andy shook his head. He patted his jacket and found a package of gum. He pulled it out of his breast pocket only to find it empty.

  “Crap,” he said. “I need a stick of gum.”

  “Is that one of your rituals?”

  “No. Idiot. What kind of ritual would I need gum for? Chewing gum calms me down during the race.”

  I reached into my pocket and produced the stick of gum I’d found in the parking lot. “Ta da,” I said. I went to put it on the table and remembered it had tire marks on one side. I turned it over as I put it down so Andy wouldn’t see.

  Andy stared straight at me as he picked up the gum, unwrapped it, and jammed it into his mouth. “This doesn’t change anything, Luck.”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way, Penn—er—Penrod.”

  Andy glared. I couldn’t be sure if he’d caught the fact that I’d almost called him Penny Andy. Did he even know what people called him behind his back? Did Wince?

  “Tell you what,” I said, changing the subject. “Let’s make a wager. If I pick the winning dog in the first race, you tell me what I want to know. If I don’t, I’ll leave you alone.”

  Shifting the gum from one set of molars to the other, Andy considered. A voice announced that the betting windows would close in ten minutes. “Tempting,” he said. “I especially like the part about you leavin’ me alone.”

  “Only one way to find out, Andy. Do we have a bet?”

  Andy chewed faster and narrowed his eyes. “An 87.5 percent chance I won’t see your face again? It’s a bet.”

  “Cool.” I stood up and walked through the casino to the race windows. I didn’t need the racing form for wha
t I wanted. The cashier didn’t even bat an eyelash when I told her what to do. I wasn’t really spending very much, but the investment would be worth it to get information out of Andy.

  By the time I got back to Andy’s table, the race was about to start. I stood with my arms folded. Seconds later, there was a bell and someone, I don’t know who, let the dogs out.

  The traditional mechanical rabbit jumped from its box on the inside rail and eight beautiful dogs streaked out of the gate like their tails were on fire. I listened to the call and the announcer said Amber Heard You had taken the early lead. I admired the incredibly muscular flex-and-stretch action of rippling bodies as the dogs streaked past the window in flashes of tan and gray. The pack vanished around the turn, kicking up a cloud of flying dirt, and all eyes went to the video screens.

  I watched Andy instead. The speed of his gum chewing accelerated to somewhere between a jackhammer and hummingbird’s wings so at least he was calm. His hands clenched in fists that vibrated at their own rate. He stared at the screen with the glassy-eyed passion of a true addict and I found myself hoping his dog, whatever dog he had chosen, would win. He seemed to be in pain.

  “Come on, mutt! Come on!” he muttered.

  It was over 30.61 seconds after it had started. The winning dog was Look at the Thyme, with Pug’s Favorite and Amber Heard You taking place and show. I didn’t need detecting skills to see that Andy’s dog had not been the winner, but his reaction surprised me. He heaved a big sigh with no swearing and no rage against Lady Luck.

  Andy made some more notes and that was that.

  “I’m impressed, man.” I said. “That gum must be working. You are so calm.”

  “What? You think I’m gonna freak out every time I lose a race? I wanna freak out, I’ll just look at your face, Luck. This is a long-term strategy I got goin’ here. Losses are built into the plan. Now get out.”

  “Uh. We had a deal. Remember?” I ignored the jab at me, high road seeming best.

  Andy picked up the gum wrapper, turning it in his fingers while he thought. “What’s this?” he asked.